Porn is a
giant
industry. Lots of people have 3D graphics accelerators. Why don't we get spam about
Super 3D Hotties Who Do What You Say?

That software would be rubbish, of course, because nearly nothing sold via
spam is worth buying for one
Hong Kong cent. But the spam would be indicative of the existence of 3D X-rated "games"
where you got to tell little on-screen people what to do, or watched the action from
a first person perspective, or whatever.

There are a few such packages out there; there have been for ages. Porn games started
out 2D (oh, the horror over "MacPlaymate" back in 1986, and the thrill of sneaking it
into the school computer room!), and there actually are a few 3D ones around today.
But they all pretty much stink, at least from what I can see on the sites spruiking
them.

(Which I visited in an entirely detached, thoroughly professional and completely
tax-deductible way, I'll have you know.)

OK, as a reader's pointed out to me, there is this.
But it's, um, limited, and free. The commercial products just aren't there.

One of those humorous screen
grabs of Counter-Strike dudes apparently engaged in the Congress Of The Beetle is
a heck of a lot more realistic than any porno games I've been able to find. There are
"interactive movies" where you can direct the action,
Choose Your Own
Adventure style, but there's precious little real time rendered material.

On the face of it, this is weird. The porn industry is famous for being at the very
atomic wavefront boundary of the cutting edge of any technology they can possibly use.

There's a popular legend that VHS took off because Sony wouldn't let people release
porn on Betamax. Well, that's not true; Sony had some control over the Beta licensees,
but those companies made VCRs, not movies. The real reason was that early Beta tapes
were only an hour long. That was good enough for TV show timeshifting, but no good for
movies, dirty or otherwise.

VHS quality sucked (and it still does, though it quickly
caught up with Beta
quality-wise), but its tapes were longer. And porn was a significant factor in
its victory over Beta.

DVD? Superb for porno. Scene selection lets you skip all that boring talking and
irrelevant drama. Long before
a decent selection of clean DVD movies was available, there were slabs of porn.

JPEG, as a free-for-all image format, may or may not have been created to
reduce the bandwidth consumption of the alt.sex.pictures Usenet hierarchy, but that
was definitely part of the
motivation.
At the start of the 1990s, alt.sex.pictures was becoming such a monster GIF-stream that
many Usenet servers were dropping it not out of prudery, but just to stop their pipes
being clogged. Even if it wasn't actually made for that sole purpose, though, that's
certainly the place where it first gained popularity. JPEG allowed you to send five
24 bit images of people doin' it for the bandwidth price of one eight bit GIF of the
same thing, so the world's digital pornhounds switched format as soon as they could.

Porn companies are even trying to get people to buy naughty clips to play on mobile
phone screens, for heaven's sake. Don't ask me
why. But if evidence
were needed for the smut-peddlers' enthusiasm to, ahem, probe every niche, there it
is.

So - why no 3D porn software?

Well, part of it's got to be the inability of computers so far to render really realistic
humans, or even really realistic cartoon humans. Humans realistic enough to shoot at?
Yup. Humans realistic enough to have sex with? Nope.

But we're close, now. Look at Nvidia's good old
Dawn demo. If you find it
inadequately convincing, rename the "fairy.exe" file to "3dmark03.exe" or "quake3.exe",
for versions of Naked Dawn with and without wings.

Nvidia put a Naked Fairy Feature right there in the demo, people!

"Cinematic computing", indeed. But the kind of cinema where, ah, the carpet's not
sticky for the usual reason.

Now, the porn industry's interested in selling to regular people, not PC enthusiasts
with the latest shiny video card. It'll be a little while before the average PC can
render Naked Dawn levels of reasonably realistic nudity. So that might account for the
lack of porno software.

It also might be a production issue. A porn game would, in many technical respects,
be the same as a normal game - you'd need decent programmers and artists and animators,
you'd need voicetalent, and you'd need design people
able to craft a workable user interface.

Yes, you sniggerers in the back row, that interface would need to be usable
with only one hand.

Maybe there are substantial technical issues I'm missing, here. I shudder to think
what clipping errors might
do, for instance.
And something that looks good in a screenshot isn't necessarily convincing in motion.
The characters in "Final Fantasy - The
Spirits Within" moved more like dead bodies animated by invisible wires than like
real humans. The necrophiliac
market probably can't support a software industry segment.

Still, if Half-Life 2 can contain realistically flopping and floating mattresses,
I can't help but think that user-directed activity atop them is only a matter of time.
With real-time multiplayer online action, even.

And you know what? I'll bet you twenty bucks that some moral crusader who used to
complain about kids
shooting each
other online is going to be much, much more hysterical about people making love, not
war.